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10.06.2008

As fellow members of the educated liberal elite, I am sure you have all been ravenously consuming every tasty morsel of news concerning this Nobel Prize hullabaloo, but I feel the need nevertheless to weigh in, being someone who is normally not eager to leap to defense of American letters, but offended still. I mean, the effrontery of these Swedes! I believe the precise quotation, from a committee member, is that our nation doesn't "participate in the big dialogue of literature." First of all, one snippy, dismissive, presumptuous quotation doesn't change the fact that you're all descended from Vikings, who, last time I checked, couldn't even find their way through a 2D jungle without being killed by giant snails. Secondly, if nothing else, this should alert us all to the utter absurdity of the Nobel institution in toto. Why does anyone care about this prize? Why do we let a bunch of bitter, resentful Swedes determine the greatest achiever in fields as imprecise and ridiculous-sounding as "peace"? Moreover, why are we willing to accept the cultural rulings handed down to us from a country that has produced such grotesque cultural abortions as Dolph Lundgren and Ace of Base? Clearly, we must reject the entire Nobel project (I will admit, as an aside, that I suspect this is somehow another attempt by Hans Blix to foil our imperialist ambitions, but I have yet to develop the theory fully. They did, after all, choose that hippie peacenik Al Gore last year...). Anyway, I hope that Delillo, Roth, and our other great writers don't sit up at night worrying about the words from this goober below, who to me resembles the progeny of an unholy, yet undeniably hilarious, union between William F. Buckley and Christopher Hitchens. After all, we Americans never really thought much of the Prize in the first place. Saul Bellow didn't give a shit when he was selected, and most of the other Americans that have won the prize were hacks of an inoffensive sort (I'm looking at you, John Steinbeck). The Nobel committee has notoriously overlooked numerous luminaries in favor of unknown aberrations like this guy, who appear to have been selected for holding comfortably leftist ideologies rather than for any significant literary achievement. If anyone sees this particular Swedish knucklehead, smack him on the head with one of these. Payback's a 1100 page postmodern American bitch, bitch.